What Makes These People Indispensable?
One of the most depressing things about our political system is that new ideas and new faces are so few and far between. President Obama ran on a platform of change, but his administration is already filled with names and faces that are all too familiar to the American public. If change really is going to be the focus of his presidency, filling his cabinet with recycled Clintonites doesn’t seem like the best way to achieve it.
President Obama is not alone in placing a high value on past experience when choosing Cabinet level officials. President Bush surrounded himself with acolytes from various Republican administrations dating all the way back to Richard Nixon. History will be the final judge, but the experience that these veterans of past administrations brought to the table doesn’t seem to have served him particularly well.
The most common argument we hear in favor of the unending cycle of revolving door cabinet appointments is that it is essential to have inside knowledge of the way Washington works. Unfortunately, this logic is deeply flawed. Our federal government is one of the most dysfunctional organizations on the planet, and inside knowledge of how to operate within a broken system only serves to make you part of the problem, not the solution.
President Obama has also reneged on his pledge to keep lobbyists out of his administration. According to USA Today, 21 registered lobbyists have been appointed to various posts thus far, including William Lynn, who will serve as Deputy Defense Secretary, and Mark Patterson, who will serve as Tim Geithner’s chief of staff at Treasury. Lynn is a former lobbyist for defense contractor Raytheon, a firm that received over $54 Billion in government contracts during his six year tenure. Until April of 2008, Patterson was a lobbyist for Goldman-Sachs, a company that has received $10 Billion in TARP bailout funds. How can these people possibly do their jobs without major conflicts of interest, and why are there no other candidates for these posts who do not bring excess baggage to the table?
The most troubling appointment so far is that of Tim Geithner to be Treasury Secretary. Sixty members of the Senate voted in favor of his confirmation, buying into the argument that his experience somehow made him indispensable. The fact that he knowingly failed to pay his taxes for years was simply overlooked since he is somehow regarded as the only one capable of solving our current economic troubles. The amazing thing is that this guy was the chief architect of the TARP program, and there are 60 senators who still believe that he is the answer and not the problem!
I had not intended for this be a post about President Obama and his cabinet picks. What he has done is simply par for the course in Washington. My real question is what makes us believe that any one person is somehow the only one capable of performing a particular job? If we look at the world today and the people who consider themselves to be indispensable, Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez are the best examples that come to mind. Why are we willing to bend the rules and overlook potentially criminal activity to avail ourselves of the services of one individual? In a nation of 300 million people, I refuse to believe that there is not a single law abiding citizen with qualifications equal to or greater than Tim Geithner’s.
As voters, we need to ask ourselves why new names and faces so rare in Washington, and why are we never presented with options for real change? We consider ourselves to be the greatest democracy in the world, but we can’t seem to come up with candidates who are actually worthy of holding public office.
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